Today a large patch was released for Endless Legend, introducing Steam Workshop support and cheap DLC for new music, quests, heroes, etc. While I'm busy cursing my lack of time to properly finish a match of this, I figure it's time to examine why I keep coming back to this game time & time again, to the point it's become my 2nd-most played 4X strategy game (beaten only by Civ4). The broad reason is that it does enough things different from both 4X games and fantasy games to give it a distinct personality, but I'll dig a bit deeper than that.

The first thing that strikes you, when choosing a race, is how utterly different they are, both from each other and from the standard fantasy tropes. Each race has a schtick which drastically changes how they play, from mobile cities to being restricted to just one city to using Wealth instead of Food to grow population. The "elves" act more like industrial lycanthropes. The "undead" are covered by a hivemind of ravenous sci-fi bugs and a knighthood of animated armors that drain souls to survive. The "dragons" are renowned diplomats and historians. The "humans" are traders who build cities on giant beetles or the stranded remnants of a colony ship that crashed on the planet long ago. The doomsday cult? Follows an indestructible supercomputer that went insane from its isolation and inability to destroy itself.

The colony ship and supercomputer aren't the only sci-fi artifacts in the game. The game is heavily tied into Amplitude's previous sci-fi 4X game, Endless Space, and the more you poke at the seemingly-magical aspects of the game, the more Clarke's Third Law reveals itself. The sheer variety of fauna/flora? Escaped specimens in a genetic testing ground. The spectral wraiths haunting the ruins? Manifestations of ancient AIs. The increasingly-hostile winters? A planetary weather system breaking down from millenia of disrepair. The melding of "magic" and sci-fi justifies the struggle to understand this world. If it was pure magic, you could simply rely on faith in the gods for answers. If it was pure sci-fi, you could study it, break it down, and reverse-engineer it. Instead, you play medieval people picking through the ruins of spacefarers, struggling to comprehend what came before you and why they all died off.

The Winters themselves play a key part in the game's mechanics and feel. As turns progress, the seasons cycle between Summers and Winters. Summers are your typical 4X-building setting, but Winters confer a myriad of penalties that slow down production & movement. The typical response to Winters is to slow down or halt production, have armies huddle in your cities instead of roaming, and try not to starve. As the game progresses, the Winters grow more numerous and worse (forcing civilizations to adapt), and they're revealed to be tied to the eventual destruction of the world, lending the whole game a feeling to trying to thrive on a beautiful-yet-dying world.

I could get into the mechanics of the game, and how they restrict your choices while making them more meaningful (similar to the XCOM remake), but that wouldn't be enough to keep me coming back. But Endless Legend paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of a fantasy world amidst sci-fi ruins that's unlike anything else I've seen in gaming (although some of the later Might & Magic games come close), and I keep coming back to try and unite the world as the Drakken again.

It's such a good game. Amplitude is out there, taking the kind of bold risks I'd like to see people take when making a new 4X game. It's kind of sad to see Civilization: Beyond Earth get coverage here on Giant Bomb (both the original game and the expansion), when it's pretty much the safest Civ 5 reskin possible, while Endless Legend got completely passed by. The systems in Endless Legend are really fun to mess around with, and it probably has some of the best flavour I've ever seen in a 4X game that has its own original fiction and isn't just "Hitler vs. Gandhi".

My only complaint is that while I love how the various factions have such wildly differing fundamentals, sometimes it feels like it railroads you into certain victory types. The human trader faction, for example, has a tough time with an Elimination, Expansion, or Supremacy victory, when an inherent part of their faction is that they cannot declare war on anyone, so conquering territory isn't something you can easily initiate. I guess you could bait each faction into attacking you first, but generally it's easier to pursue science, diplomacy, or other victory conditions. Or on another note, if you're in a game against the dragon faction, a diplomacy victory is a pretty steep hill to climb because the dragons' diplomacy abilities are so stacked.

I'd like to see GB East mess with Endless Legend on Choose Our Own Adventure, but the chat would probably hate it. But if there was ever a game deserving of a "sorry, we fucked up, here's a late Quick Look", it's Endless Legend.

@bisonhero: I see the victory condition railroading as a necessary evil for wildly differing fundamentals, as I can't think of a good solution to it other than reducing how wildly they differ. Since I value differing fundamentals more than being able to win any victory as any faction, I'll stick with the fundamentals.

And you never know, the chat seemed to enjoy the Crusader Kings II play. Set it on a Small world with a Short time limit and I bet plenty of shenanigans would occur. We would just need to get enough votes for it to win Choose Your Own Adventure eventually.

This is really well described. I've praised Endless Legend myself hereabouts a few times and suggested it for QL's and such, it really has been my favorite 4x type game since Civ5. Now I just need to find some time during the holidays to get into the DLCs they've released.

Appendeum: I wanted to say something about Endless Legend's Region mechanic, but it didn't seem to fit into my initial points well and I didn't have any good stories to illustrate it. Now I do. Behold, Shadow Island:

The basic gist of the Region mechanic is this:

• The landscape is divided into Regions.
• There can only be one city per Region.

This is Endless Legend's solution to the Infinite City Sprawl problem from the Civ series (where the best strategy is to plaster numerous small cities across the land). The island I started on only has 4 Regions, so I can only build 4 Cities on it. However, if I build all 4 cities on it, I can also lock out other factions from building cities on it. Which I was in the process of doing... when I saw some Vaulter settlers landing nearby. Cue a panicked rush to kill them before they founded a new city. (Diplomatic relations in Endless Legend default to "Cold War", in which you can kill rival units outside of their own territory without declaring all-out war.)

After that scare, I quickly plunked down 2 Settlers of my own to finish civilizing the island. However, each new city reduces your Approval, and now my cities are Unhappy and consequently producing less resources, so now I have to quickly scramble to research Culture techs to improve my Approval before my overseas neighbors get feisty. But at least I control the entire island now!

I really wanted to love this game, but I found the process of learning it really, REALLY complicated. There's a TON going on in Endless Legend. It feels like there's so much more than Civ V that I sadly lost interest in trying to get a handle on it, and switched to Age of Wonders 3 instead.

Should really give it another shot, see if there are any decent guides out there

@giantstalker: Really? I actually found it less complicated than Civ4, although Civ5 was also less complicated... honestly, I barely played Civ5. Perhaps I should go back to that. Let me see if I can distill the important differences...

Food, Industry, and Science work just as you expect them to. Dust is the game's currency, you use it to buy stuff on the market or rush building. Influence (the stars) is used to set your 20-Turn Plans and make diplomatic deals.

The big issue newcomers have is the choice between founding new cities or expanding existing ones. Each new city costs you 10 gold per turn, reduces your empire-wide Approval by 10(which adds bonuses/penalties to production), and makes Empire-wide Plans cost more Influence, so a fledging city could easily remove several bonuses from your established cities. Expanding an existing city gives you fewer resources than founding a new one, but has fewer drawbacks too. (It only drops Approval in the expanded city by 10.)

Next up is combat. Each faction has 3 different types of units, plus a hero unit. Combat units fall into broad categories: Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry, Support, Flying. Each unit can choose 1 of 2-3 different weapon types. The weapon type determines what bonus they get; some do extra damage to Infantry, others let you hit every enemy around you when you counter. These weapons can also be made from strategic resources, which boost their stats in specific ways, like +Damage or +Initiative. When you design a unit, keep in mind what enemy units you'll be fighting. Decide how much production/resources you'll spend on the unit, and finally choose which trinkets he'll take.

Diplomacy is the next big hurdle. Every diplomatic action in the game costs Influence; you can't constantly trade for large items like new techs unless you have a steady supply of Influence. You'll also need to (usually) be at Peace or be Allies.

I just recently heard about this game and immediately placed it on my wishlist.

I don't have much to add beyond sing it's praises!

It does to many cool things! Some might not be perfect, like the combat. but it is still quite a bit better then something like civ.
And the market!
And the wildly different races!

Absolutely. I implored all my friends who were thinking of getting Beyond Earth to instead consider E:L because it makes really nice changes to the formula. Not to mention it has Amplitude's gorgeous UI design. Unsurprisingly Beyond Earth seemed pretty dull in comparison.

The only thing I really hate in Amplitude games is their fascination with adding unit designers. I hate having to upgrade units my components and keep making new blueprints or see the opponents blow me out of the water. At the very least I'd appreciate the option to select from prefab units so I can just keep upgrading without manually fiddling around.

@bisonhero: Absolutely. Never understood why the game never appeared in GB discussions or videos. It's really great.

@ouvintes said:

It seems like literally none of them played it. I at least hoped Alex might, since he plays Civilization 5, and Endless Legend isn't that hard to figure out if you already get Civ. But to my knowledge, no one on GB's staff has ever mentioned this game in a podcast or video ever.

Supposedly GB East (and sometimes West) will end up looking for Steam games to Quick Look, end up playing garbage that isn't very good as part of the research process and often don't film Quick Looks for those garbage games. At times they've said they're constantly on the look out for hidden gems to Quick Look because the Steam new releases list is such nonsense nowadays. With all that wasted time, you'd think one of them could've actually messed around with Endless Legend back when it came out, since it's actually from a developer with a decent track record, and other game critics were quite positive about Endless Legend.

@giantstalker: I know what you mean. I found it really complicated, too. Particularly the whole "region" system. I'm gonna give the game another shot soon though. Sounds like the post-release support has been good.

@fitzgerald: I found the Region system to be simple once I wrapped my head around it:

• You can only have one City per Region.
• The City exploits the tile it's on and all adjacent tiles that are in the same region.
• You can expand your City out from its initial tile by building Borough Streets. Each Borough Street expands the City by 1 tile, but reduces Approval in that City by 10. (Boroughs also require 2 population per additional Borough.)
• A City tile surrounded by 4 other City tiles improves to Level 2, which gives the city +15 approval and increases the Dust/Science/Influence produced by the tile. Therefore a tightly-clustered city can be happier & more productive than a city strung along the coast.
• You want to build your cities in clusters of anomalies/resources that you can expand into while having enough space to build your Boroughs next to each other.

The only reason I didn't play more Endless Legend last year was that it ran sort of slow on my computer and strategy games like that are a lot harder to swallow when AI turns take too long. (I opted for Age of Wonders III, which I still maintain is the best strategy game of last year) Otherwise, it seems very much up my alley with the way it's set up, far less dry than Endless Space was.

I love this game a lot, i've played it a lot with friends over the year and i even gave it my goty last year. the day of the update was my birthday and i spent the whole day playing it. I wish more people could get into this game but I do know it has a steep learning curve, but once you get over the initial hump the game runs very smooth.

Amplitude is also just SOOO good about their faction identity and i love getting into all the factions in this game and I can't wait to see what they do for Endless Space 2.

(if you want to know more about my VERY in depth thoughts on the game, read my review! the review seems a lot like a design doc but i sort of felt the need to write it like that because of its intricate systems)

@bisonhero: I would assume that Austin has played it but when he joined GB that ship had already sailed, I guess. Would love to hear his thoughts on it as it seems to be a game he would have enjoyed a lot ! Actually, he was on a podcast discussing 4X games before joining GB. Must listen to it...

Amplitude is a truly great developer.

I'm really looking forward to Endless Space 2.

I really wanted this game to be the next Civ V for me. But there were a couple of dealbreakers for me.

First of all, it had kind of a steep learning curve. It took me a really long time to grasp all of the various systems and gameplay aspects, not to mention the drastically different playstyles of the races.

Second of all: the combat sucked. Like, really bad. I appreciated the stacking of a few units and positioning, but the command AI was completely terrible, and having no direct control over your units was really frustrating.

Third and worst of all: it just felt bland. It felt soulless. I didn't have the feeling that I was leading Japan to conquer the world from under the heel of Ghandi's nuclear reign. I wasn't identifying with the factions. For me it just felt like watching numbers on the screen, and making the numbers go up in the right ways. But the charm and immersion present in Civ V was simply not there for me.

The game has some spectacular design choices and systems; diplomacy is more complex, the hero system is fantastic, and the neutral settlements are a interesting concept. Ultimately though, the game didn't have the heart that I was looking for.

EDIT: Also, the graphical design in the UI and things like the choice of fonts, symbols and a map made of perfect hexagons made the world management feel kind of... sterile? Like I was playing an excel sheet or something.

So this is on sale right now... How's the DLC? Should I get the bundle with all the DLC, or just the base game?

@l33t_haxor: Yes. The base game itself is worth $30-40 IMO. The game + all DLC for $20 is a steal. There's nothing exactly world-shattering about the DLC, but it's worth $10.

Instead, you play medieval people picking through the ruins of spacefarers, struggling to comprehend what came before you and why they all died off.

a feeling to trying to thrive on a beautiful-yet-dying world.

Damn, I need to write a blog post about Amplitude games. They are just so captivatingly melancholic. And they're 4X games! 4X games and a dungeon crawler have stirred more emotion in me than most other games put together.

Dungeon of the Endless is more dark screwball comedy adventure.

I was having a good time with this game a month or so out from its release when I ran into an issue with my units becoming randomly stuck/impossible to command. I assume that bug is fixed by now so it might be worth giving another try...

Just wondering, how is this game compared to endless space? I haven't played either but have heard a number of good things about endless space from 4x fans.

@belegorm: I've only played Endless Legend, but I've heard a number of good things about Endless Legend, too, including that it's a better game than Endless Space.

@belegorm said:

In short, Endless Legend has a lot of the same design sensibilities of Endless Space, but I think Endless Legend executes better across the board. It works a tiny bit more like regular Civilization 4X (you're on a grid on solid ground, you're managing cities instead of systems and planets, etc.) whereas the map screen on Endless Space is very much unlike the tile-based system of other 4X games, so in that sense Endless Legend is a lot more traditional, but it's still pretty out there with some of its cool ideas.

Longer version:

So there's that. Plus Endless Legend has a bunch of new systems in it (you get a bunch of quests, both random encounter quests and quests tied to your faction's storyline, there are "minor factions" sort of like city states from Civ 5 but you actually assimilate the minor factions into your empire and then have sweet ghosts or bird people units). Endless Legend is really fucking cool.

Right now, I'd recommend Endless Legend over Endless Space, because it seems like the devs learned a lot of lessons on which systems players did or did not connect with from Endless Space and applied those lessons to Endless Legend. Or maybe they think Endless Space is fucking great, and just happened to make a very different game in Endless Legend that most critics seemed to like waaaay more. Endless Space 2 has been announced, so I'd basically recommend skipping Endless Space entirely, to wait and see if the sequel is as good as Endless Legend.

Oh also, since you haven't played either game, they have "Endless" in the title because in the connected universe of the games, The Endless were some ancient precursor alien civilization that has dope ancient ruins and ancient technology scattered across the galaxy.

Man, I could've lived with it if just the characters were these badasses that joked around about their predicament, but all of the item names and descriptions are soooo dumb. It's the only major thing I dislike about Dungeon of the Endless. A) The campy items and descriptions aren't that funny, but you can tell they're trying to be, and B) the humour is so tonally at odds with Endless Space and Endless Legend.

this game has been my go-to "i have nothing to do" game for about the last year. it's really, really good and the art style is gorgeous. I'd recommend it to anyone who can enjoy a slower paced strategy game

@mikelemmer: Thanks, just bought!

Gonna pick this up in the Steam sale and check it out. For some reason I'd been under the impression this was a Stardock game and therefore completely ignored it...

@jimbo: Nope. You're thinking of Fallen Enchantress, which seems much like Endless Legend at first glance. Similar unit outfitting, similar heroes questing to help a civilization's cities, similar combat. And I've put a fair bit of hours into Fallen Enchantress, too (almost 50, according to Steam, compared to my 75 hours in Endless Legend). However, Endless Legend grabbed me where Fallen Enchantress didn't. Fallen Enchantress's plot & factions felt utterly generic fantasy, and its gameplay didn't have anything revolutionary and wasn't better than the tried-and-true Civ series.

Speaking of plots, now that I compare Enchantress's fantasy world war plot to Endless Legend's dying world plot, I have to give Endless Legend props for making the world, not the enemy factions, the ultimate enemy. It justifies the fixed game length (the game ends at 300 turns when Eternal Winter hits and the planet finally dies) and doesn't force faction-vs-faction warfare like many fantasy 4X games do. My only gripe with it is several of the victory conditions (domination, economic victory, diplomatic victory) are rendered moot by the planet's death, but I suppose you could handwave that with "once they control the world, they focus their energies on saving/escaping it".

@mikelemmer: Me and a friend just got it, and after hitting the tutorial, we went into a game with 4 bots. 3 hours felt like 10, but man the game is really nice. Grabbed me right off the bat. I can see myself dumping...too much time into this.

And the UI is super slick.

Just bought the game on the steam sale, and I'm pretty psyched to finally play it

Has anyone got an idea what causes the AI to react to you in various ways?

I played my first game as the Drakken a day or two ago. Unlike any of my other playthroughs as other factions, the AI all pretty quickly closed their borders to me as soon as they amassed the influence to do so. Some were near, some were far, some outstripped my military, some were weaker than me, but they pretty much all did it. I barely remember anybody closing borders in previous games, except when maybe I was obviously traipsing about their territory with a sizable army, exploring ruins, and the AI got nervous.

The only thing I can think of is that the Drakken trait immediately tells you where each empire is located at the start of the game, which sort of means you know where their capital is (but you don't have vision of it), so maybe they were all just nervous that I had "discovered" the location of the capital and might invade it any second, even though I was dozens and dozens of turns away from that being remotely possible?

Then eventually I just made alliances with everybody.

Diplomacy victory is weird, because once you get a bunch of buildings that produce influence, then A) you get to the point that you can easily max out your empire plan, and B) it doesn't even cost that much influence to create alliances with everybody and that's all you can really do to get to diplomatic victory faster, and C) there is literally no way on the tech tree to accelerate your progress to diplomatic victory except for one tech in the final era that doubles your diplomacy point gain. I kinda didn't understand how all of that really worked until halfway through my Drakken game, because for some reason I thought diplomatic victory was based on influence gained sort of like how economic victory is based on Dust gained, but I was super wrong about that.

@bisonhero: Not sure. Perhaps the change has something to do with the AI modifications they made in the last patch? I know they changed a shitton of AI stuff concerning the value of certain trades.

@mikelemmer: I should mention it was the first game I played with the Shadows add-on, and I'm not clear on whether the AI changes were part of a general patch, or specifically only apply to the Shadows expansion. I played another game only like a week ago as a different faction and nobody was nearly as keen to just close borders constantly.

Coming from Civ, it's kind of crazy that borders are open all the time by default, but I guess that carries with it the risk that you can freely be attacked in the default cold war unless you're on home territory.

@bisonhero: That might explain it. I think it's because you can pillage enemy resources without declaring War now, so closing borders is to ensure you have to declare War to start pillaging. Don't quote me on that, though, I haven't tried pillaging a Cold War rival yet.

I am in love with this game. I bought it today, well yesterday now, no a whim. The Amplitude pack was $33, which included this with all DLC, Endless Space with all DLC, and Dungeon of the Endless with all DLC. And I played this first. I came home from work at 2pm and started playing. I just stopped. I haven't eaten dinner yet or anything. All I did for 11 hours was play this game. This is going to be my new crack. What CKII was, has been for so many years. I'm sure what makes this so addicting, but I didn't even realize how much had passed. Its rare for me to get into that kind of zoned, intense tunnel vision of a game.

That $33 for 3 games and some DLC is probably going to end up taking the next few months of my gaming life.

I just picked this up in the Steam sale. I'm a huge fan of the Civ games so I'm keen to give this a try. To be honest it looks a little intimidating at the outset. Civ I at least understand History and how things are meant to work. I've heard nothing but good things about this game though.

I really need to find some time to get into this game. I was severely disappointed with the initial Civ 5 release, and sometimes I just get the itch to play a really good new 4x game. Too bad my backlog is top heavy with 100+ hour RPGs and exploration games right now. Ugh.

First world problems.

I got to turn 92 in my first playthrough on normal, at which point I realized the other 5 nations were all whooping my butt. By turn 100 it was game over for me. I'm going to start one on beginner next just to see more of the late game stuff to get a better understanding of some of the games more in-depth mechanics. Because I thought I was doing pretty good after playing the tutorial, but turns out I missed some key stuff. Or I just made some horrible choices.

@sterling: One thing that is easy to do in this game (but trickier in Civ) is you can choose a large or huge map size (meant for 6-8 players) but then in the game setup, only include 1-2 opposing empires plus yourself. It gives you a lot more room and time to expand because it is unlikely anyone will start near you.

Did you get behind in military ways, or other ways? In my experience, AI empires are not going to be anywhere close to any victory condition at turn 100, so I'm guessing you just felt you were irrevocably behind?

@bisonhero: I was behind in military capabilities. I had one empire declare open war on me because they wanted some of my resources or something I cant remember now. And their army was four times mine. They just beat me down over and over. And then I some how got mixed up in cold war conflict with another empire on my way to help fight the current one, and it just all went down hill really quickly. I had a very hard time recovering. And so I ended the game, and all the charts at the end showed me way behind all of them, even in what I thought I was ahead in. I was behind in everything. Some by just a little, but mostly by like 50-100 points on the charts. I was shocked. Maybe I accidentally chose hard, but I swear it was normal. But it was also my first game, so I probably did some things I shouldn't have. Like not build a second city until around turn 70. Or focus entirely on tech to improve my city, and too much exploring and quests.

I try to have my 2nd city built around Turn 40-50. You also want to build Borough Streets to expand the # of tiles your city can exploit.

Finally, there's a few races, like the Cultists & Necrophages, that are extremely aggressive. Be wary of them, and make sure you have enough defenses if you start near one of them.

@mikelemmer: Those were the two I was warring with. The Cultists were the ones really kicking my ass.

@sterling: Then you got really unlucky with starting position, and should've started building up your defenses ASAP once you discovered them.

Cultists can also exploit native villages really well; they probably got a slew of units from them to beat you down.